From the Ashes, Flames
by WriterSpud
Summary: Original character, not a Mary-Sue. Mostly an exercise in writing in a different style, not much plot-wise.


A/N: This isn't that much of a story - I wrote this mostly to both clear up a bit of writer's block, and to experiment with a slightly different style. I might end up continuing this, might not, depends on how much the character (original character, sorry, don't hurt me) grows and how happy I am with this when it's done. The PG-13 is just for a few vague kind-of mentions of some unpleasant topics, which may or may not be elaborated on if this continues.

Disclaimer: Nora is mine, and I think I like her. Everyone who you recognize isn't mine, and I'm actually losing money by writing this (should be filling out applications for summer jobs, y'know). All hail Marvel, Fox, etc.

###

For all practical purposes, Nora McKenzie was blind. 

She wasn't truly blind. Hadn't ever been. Used to have perfect vision. And then _it_ happened, and she was blind. Her world became one of blurred lines between white and red and yellow and blue and green. Heat. Fire was no longer red-orange; it burned white at the bottom and flickered to a vivid red at the top. People weren't people; they were masses of red and yellow and a little bit of green. 

And that wasn't the end of it. She could get away with being blind, because that didn't need to be a mutation. But heat was. Producing heat. Skin at a temperature that would render a human dead, an aura of scalding heat around her. Heat she didn't feel, heat that could leave - had left people with 3rd degree burns on their hands, on their arms. They'd brushed by her on the street, had tried to tap her on the shoulder. 

She couldn't help it. 

For a good inch or two around her - a protective bubble of heat. 

By the time someone got hurt, the scared crowd formed, and anger spouted. 

And she ran. 

###

She hadn't understood when she found the card in her pocket. She never carried little scraps of paper because she couldn't read them. Someone had put it there, and it was in Braille. 

Her father taught her Braille, when she went blind. She'd always been home-schooled, so it was easy to shift from memorizing history to memorizing patterns of raised dots. She didn't use it much now, because it reminded her of him, and of That Night, and she didn't think about that. 

But now there was a Braille-printed business card in her pocket. The jacket had been hanging on the back of her chair in the motel room, so someone had been in there. She fingered the edges of it for a second then slowly ran her fingers over the bumps, dredging up letters from long ago. Three, four years? She didn't count. 

__

Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters

1407 Graymalkin Lane,

Westchester, New York

Professor Charles Xavier, Headmaster

The numbers took her a minute to figure out, because she'd been bad at math always and worse at math when she had to feel the numbers. An address. Headmaster - a school? 

She sat down on the bed that smelled like mothballs and turned the card over and over in her hands. The lights in the motel room didn't work and she knew because she couldn't see the heat from a 60-watt light bulb, but she didn't care, because light distracted her. The heat did, it was background static. 

She was in New Jersey now, just across the river from Philadelphia. She'd taken Amtrak from DC to Newark to Philly, and a Greyhound from there to Jersey, a town where the name made her think of rows of identical townhouses with small black mailboxes and high-end Toyotas in the driveways, trying to be high class but failing because they didn't have the money. The man at the station didn't question the young blind woman and called her a cab, gave her the name of a local cheap motel. She'd paid in cash, fingering the greatly-reduced wad of bills. Bills that were carefully folded a certain way; to tell the denomination, because people would take a 10 and say it was a single if they thought she didn't know. Bills that she had kept for years, under her mattress in the group home in DC. It wasn't a group home, they said, it was a foster home, but there were no caring surrogate parents, and these were the kids who weren't ever going to be adopted mostly because they'd die of AIDS or end up in prison or both before they were twenty. She'd been the only white kid there but didn't know, and didn't care that that was why no one bothered her and probably didn't notice when she left. 

It was late and it was raining outside and through the opened curtains the walkway lights and raindrops played games, turning the world outside into a mirage of greens and yellows fighting and dancing. 

There was another lump of money in the other jacket pocket, and it surprised Nora because it wasn't hers, there was too much - It was folded properly and she was pretty sure it was four twenties folded to the size of a cigarette. 

By noon the next day she was sitting on another train going north to Westchester because she didn't have anything but a motel that should be shut down in Jersey. By one thirty she was in the mostly-empty marble train station in Westchester wondering how to go about finding Graymalkin Lane, which didn't sound like it, was in the city. She found the customer service counter because it was a little warmer than the cavernous area and square and she put on the helpless blind girl act and got a cab that took her there.

It was a big house and it was old but had been redone sometime not-long-ago: it had good insulation: there were clear lines between the house and the air. She carefully made her way up onto the porch and stumbled on the stairs that had no heat difference so they were invisible to her. The doorknob was the type with a tiny light bulb behind the button that made it easier to find. 

The door opened and a man answered it and introduced himself as Scott Summers and offered to shake hands. Nora didn't, kept her hands at her side, pretended not to see his expectant hand. There was an awkward pause before he dropped his hand because he didn't _realize_ she was blind. But she was impressed with how fast he recovered and carefully guided her to an office with a man seated behind a desk who introduced himself as Charles Xavier. 

And something was right because he said he could read minds but wouldn't unless asked. He knew her dad, he said, before dad fell in love and he'd known about her since her powers developed since he talked to her dad often before he died.

She asked why he never contacted her and why the mystery with a card in the pocket and she'd repay him as soon as she could.

Then he said she didn't have to repay and it was pay-what-you-could, and she didn't even have to stay. But he thought he could help and he'd known she'd needed time to be self-destructive and grieve and some people needed years, not weeks or months, and that there might be hope.

And Nora decided that it would be better than the next cheap motel. 

###

End Notes: I think I like Nora, think I might keep her. This may be continued, may not. Probably not any time soon, because finals are coming up. But I did just see X2 (which veritably _rocked_) and I'm in the Marvel Mindset (which is a perfect band name: "Marvel Mindset".) Anyway, please, please, _please_ review - was it too hard to follow? I've been playing around with sentence structure a lot in a couple of things, and I'm not sure I like this. It got hard to write towards the end. Lemme know what you thought? Feedback (in case it hasn't been made clear) is not only desired, it's my blood, without it, I'll die. And that'll ruin any possible chance of continuing this, won't it? Of course, that only works under the assumption you want a continuation of this…gah. Just review!


End file.
